This dissertation provides a description of the language Tadaksahak as it is spoken by the Idaksahak, a people group of about 30,000 living in the most eastern part of Mali and several isolated places in western Niger.

Tonal bilinguals of two closely related Chinese dialects are amazing people. They handle two tonal systems in their mind; their two vocabularies are from closely related dialects, and they write translation equivalents with common Chinese characters. Their unique language situation makes their mind…

On the 30th of June, Richard L. Boutwell successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Richard on this achievement!

This dissertation assesses the influence of British Celtic on the phonological development of English during and shortly after the Anglo-Saxon settlement period, ca. AD 450-700.

This PhD project investigates how Russian state-aligned media frame the war in Ukraine for international audiences and how these frames travel across borders, being adopted, adapted, or challenged by foreign media and political actors.

At LUCL, researchers aim to contribute to a comprehensive and informed perspective on the human past.

At LUCL, researchers aim to contribute to a comprehensive and informed perspective on the human past.

Lecture, Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series

On the 12th of October, Fatemeh Tabassi Mofrad successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Fatemeh on this achievement!

This 862-page monograph is a grammar of Thangmi, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the districts of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in central-eastern Nepal.

In this dissertation, a corpus of 595 seventeenth-century letters (mainly private ones) written between 1664 and 1672 is examined from a sociolinguistic perspective.

The history of sign languages of deaf people is severely understudied. The historical linguistics of sign languages offers a fundamentally new perspective on the history of human languages. This project addresses the dearth of knowledge about historical sign language linguistics through a large-scale…

On the 9th of April, Manolis Fragkiadakis successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Manolis on this achievement!

Students with learning problems experience difficulties in reading, writing, and content-area learning into and throughout their secondary-school years

This is a Special Issue of the peer-reviewed 'Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics (DuJAL)’, which focuses on promoting Dutch and Belgian work in applied linguistics among an international audience, but also welcomes contributions from other countries.

On February 20th, Gulnaz Sibgatullina succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Gulnaz on this great result.

This study presents a full descriptive account of the grammar of Mualang, covering the major features of phonology and morphosyntax as well as issues related to pragmatics.

Studying languages enables you to unearth a lot of valuable information about humans: it reveals our history and explains cultural differences and it even illustrates the process of learning new information. The University is sharing its knowledge of and passion for languages in various new ways, including…

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

This book contextualises case studies across a wide variety of languages and cultures, crystallising key interrelationships between linguistic standardisation and prescriptivism, and between ideas and practices. It focuses on different traditions of standardisation and prescription throughout the world…

A linguistic test of hypotheses rooted in genetics and archaeology.

This thesis aims at contributing to our understanding of the semantic and prosodic properties of object foci in Greek, employing theoretical and experimental tools.

What categories exist in the languages of pastoralists? Do these semantic concepts reflect universal or languagespecific tendencies? What (environment? culture?) governs the similarities (or the differences) attested crosslinguistically in cattle colour systems?

This study offers a comprehensive but balanced grammatical analysis of Ik (Icetod), Northeast Uganda’s last thriving Kuliak language.

On the 24th of October, Nurenzia Yannuar successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Nurenzia on this achievement.

On the 26th of September, Cosmas Rai Amenorvi successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Cosmas on this achievement!

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Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

How is social cognition shaped by our knowledge of language and stories?

Dissertation

On the 6th of November, Niels Schoubben successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Niels on this achievement!

What is writing? And what looks like writing, but isn’t? The Pseudo or Don’t pop-up exhibition explores the boundaries of scripts. The exhibition will run at Oude UB from 9 to 26 October.

This thesis investigates the grammar of Gaahmg, a Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic language spoken in the Blue Nile Province of North Sudan. The comprehensive description provides an analysis of the phonology, morphology, and syntax. Ten texts of various genre are given to help illustrated the grammar…

A new publication that brings together perspectives on language contact phenomena across temporal and spatial dimensions.

What evaluative languages (errors, mistakes, vices, etc.) did book reviewers employ? To what extent and on what occasions did they invoke early modern vices? And to what extent did this differ across fields or change over the course of the century?

If idioms employed in codes of conduct could be as idiosyncratic as examples suggest, then to what extent did early modern language of vice, too, persist in this genre?

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

This PhD project investigates how language models can be used to extract structured knowledge from text in a way that is accurate, robust, and applicable to real-world use cases.